Fish Tank
Written and Directed by: Andrea Arnold
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, and Michael Fassbinder
Director of Photography: Robbie Ryan, Editor: Nicolas Chaudeurge, Production Designer: Helen Scott
Rated: Unrated
Watching Katie Jarvis move in Fish Tank is simply breathtaking. The young actress, in her first ever acting role, is full of passion and fury when she moves, jabbing, swinging, and pushing herself out of her confined areas. Early in the film she finds a horse chained in a rundown lot. She attempts to free it without even thinking. Her character Mia is on a path of destruction to free herself from the pain of the world around.
A mix between a coming-of-age drama and a social realism, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is a thrilling and exhilarating film about adulthood played with impeccable talent by Ms. Jarvis. The film is Ms. Arnold’s second after the experimental Red Road, a stylistically satisfying film of control, even if its narrative spun out of control. Fish Tank is more controlled and more centered. At times it even seem more conventional, but Ms. Arnold’s control of her performers keeps the film set in a believable realism, and keeps us engrossed in Mia’s plot.
Mia may be fifteen, but she thinks she years beyond that. She is a ball of passion, fighting against her alcoholic mother, as well as her potty-mouthed sister. Mia hides herself behind sweatpants and sweatshirts—she is afraid of sexuality, never flaunting it. When she comes across a group of teenage girls dancing to an R&B song, she breaks the nose of one of them. When we later see Mia move her own body to song, it’s different. She choose 90s rap and break dancing as her expression of her pain. When Ms. Jarvis performs these hip hop dances, its more than simply “cool,” but instead a true expression of character. Behind the angry eyes and lack of smiles is a girl attempting to find her identity in the world, and Ms. Jarvis conveys that without resorting to easy acting methods, but instead playing it all kin the way she moves.
The narrative starts heading down treacherous paths though when her mother picks up a new boyfriend named Connor, played by Michael Fassbinder. After Hunger and Inglourious Basterds, Mr. Fassbinder is quickly becoming one of the go to names in British Cinema. As Connor, Mr. Fassbinder plays the devil with a bare chest with strong conviction, but also loving warmth, making him more terrifying. Even worse is that Mia can’t decide what she wants Connor to be: her father, her friend, or her lover.
This of course leads to some shocking plot twists, most which work, although a few that don’t. What keeps Fish Tank moving is that Ms. Arnold has so much control of her camera and style—she is not simply trying to create neo-realism. She chooses her music, the clothes, and the cracked sidewalks with precision, as if capturing Mia’s perception of not only who she is and what the world around her is. In one frightening sequence, Mia battles another character along a shore of crashing waves. These waves envelop the screen, and push into the characters as attempting to swallow them in. What it really represents is Mia’s force of rage, throwing herself against the forces of the world that have done her wrong. She chooses hip-hop dance as her weapon against these because it allows her to use violent moves as an expression of beauty. As Ms. Jarvis’s bravura performance shows, anger can be turned into the most wondrous of art.
